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A World Intellectual Property Organization panelist has found a company in Brazil guilty of reverse domain name hijacking despite the owner of the domain name not responding to the UDRP.

Panelist Wilson Pinheiro Jabur made the finding against 2XT Tecnologia e Comercio de Informática Ltda, which owns the domain name passagenspromo.com.br. The company filed the case against the matching .com domain, passagenspromo.com.

The domain was registered in 2013 before the Complainant started using the mark. The domain means “promo tickets” in Portuguese.

The Complainant characterized the domain as typosquatting and argued that the registrant intended to sell it to the highest bidder given that it did not take any steps to acquire trademark rights over the term.

Historical Whois records can’t confirm the original registrant of the domain due to Whois privacy but the domain has always been registered at PublicDomainRegistry.

The Complainant basically agreed that it was registered in 2013, which is fatal to its case. In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the panelist wrote:

In the present case, the Panel considers that the Complainant has been guilty of RDNH due to the fact that it has failed by a large margin, since the Complainant knew or at least should have known that it did not possess enough evidence to prove at least one of the essential elements contained in paragraph 4(a) of the Policy.

The Complainant’s representative quoted UDRP case law and the Panel thinks it is unlikely that he was unaware of (i) the consensus set forth in section 3.8 of the WIPO Overview 3.0; and (ii) the current overwhelming view of UDRP panelists as to the need to prove registration and use in bad faith.

Suit alleges that domain name wasn’t owned by defendants named in class action.

Bitseller, a company in Cyprus, says that Verisign shouldn’t have transferred the domain name Radaris.com as requested by a court and is asking (pdf) for at least $500,000 in damages.

The backstory is interesting. In 2014, attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against organizations that is said were running Radaris.com. The lawsuit claimed that Radaris, which aggregates public information about individuals and businesses, was not complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

In 2017 the court issued a default judgment against the defendants in that case and ordered Radaris.com to be transferred to the plaintiffs. The domain’s registrar, EuroDNS, refused to transfer the domain. So, according to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs took their court order to Verisign and got the domain transferred.

Bitseller says that it operates the Radaris website and that the domain is registered by a company called Accuracy Consulting. Historical Whois information supports that Accuracy Consulting was the registrant of the domain.

Yet, despite neither Bitseller nor Accuracy being named in the original lawsuit, the domain was transferred. Bitseller and Accuracy got the court in the class action case to determine that the domain should be returned.

Bitseller eventually got the name back but argues that it suffered great losses from not having the domain name. It says that Verisign could have easily verified that Accuracy was not named in the lawsuit.

Verisign’s defense in this case will likely be that it was just complying with a court order as it always does. That court ordered stated:

To the extent that the registrars do not assist in changing the registrars of record for the domains under their control within 1 business day of receipt of this Order, the top-level domain (TLD) registrars [sic] (or their administrators) for the Subject Domain Names within 5 business days of receipt of this Order shall change or assist in changing the registrars of record for the Subject Domain Names to a registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing.

An updated website at Scratch.org notes that it was registered in 1998 and includes the dictionary definition of the word.

Earlier this year Scratch Foundation, a non-profit that started at MIT, filed an in rem lawsuit (pdf) against the domain name Scratch.org claiming that the domain is cybersquatting.

In the complaint, Scratch Foundation said it reached out to the owner of the domain name in 2015 and offered under $5,000 for the name. According to the lawsuit, the owner asked for $450,000 and shortly thereafter started showing ads related to credit repair.

The owner of the domain name is now defending the domain name in court. Ravi Lahoti says (pdf) he registered the domain in 1998, which is well before Scratch Foundation was created in 2007.

If the name Lahoti looks familiar, that might be because Ravi Lahoti is the brother of UDRPSearch.com owner David Lahoti. A third brother, Raj Lahoti, runs DMV.org.

In a filing yesterday, Ravi Lahoti asked that the Scratch.org lawsuit be transferred to California.

Ravi updated the site at Scratch.org recently to includes news articles and videos with the word scratch in them. It also has a notice that the domain was registered in 1998 and includes the dictionary definition of scratch.

Company tells domain name overseer that it doesn’t want .Honeywell anymore.

American conglomerate Honeywell (NYSE: HON) has decided it doesn’t want to run its own top level domain name after all.

The company informed (pdf) ICANN last month that it wishes to terminate its agreement to run .honeywell as a top level domain name. The company never used the domain; the only second level domain name it registered under .Honeywell was the obligatory nic.honeywell.